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- Ezra Klein discusses how a corporate focus on buybacks and dividends rather than actually investing capital leads to less opportunities for workers. Nora Loreto offers her take on precarious work in Canada. And Lynne Fernandez and Kirsten Bernas make the case for a living wage in Manitoba and elsewhere.

- Paul Krugman writes that if the Republicans manage to take both houses of Congress, we can expect them to turn voodoo economics into the default means of evaluating policy choices.

- Murray Mandryk crunches some numbers and finds that the main effect (Read more…)

Leftdog has already weighed in on one key connection to be drawn based on the latest news about the siphoning of money from a supposed attempt to toward insiders with a sole-sourced deal to provide computers at inflated prices. But let’s look at a couple more points arising out of the story. All of this seems to contradict what Donna Harpauer, the government minister responsible, told the NDP Opposition last June.

“The contract cost was within the acceptable range for similar goods and services and the goods and services were necessary,” Harpauer said at the time.

Others have already pointed out last week’s news that oil-sands operators are pulling out of a major carbon capture and storage project. But it’s worth taking a closer look at their explanation, and how it compares to the Cons’ claim to have the slightest interest in dealing with climate change.

Here’s why the oil industry isn’t bothering with CCS:

“Our decision was essentially based on the fact that we could not see a way to make the economics of our CCS project work as we originally intended,” said Don Wharton, vice-president of policy and sustainability at TransAlta.